As I listened to the variety of voices expressing their thoughts and hopes for this remembrance day 2013, I realized once again what a different world I, and those like me, live in. Not to be snooty, you understand. Holier than thou is not my game plan. It’s not about special or sacred or spared. More about looking around and seeing a level playing field, one where all levels of being exist simultaneously. One where those we deign to remember also remember us, and are, more often than not, standing right next to us, either ghostly or reborn.

The expressions of mass consciousness which grip society from time to time, from sports to scandal, plagues and wars, are like great storms which rage through, making the many rattle to their tunes. But those of us who dwell inside the calm heart of the soul’s serenity, like snug cottagers by the fire in a sudden winter snowfall, observe the coming and going of souls in bodies with the compassion which sees the passionate ignorance that drives the excitable into sacrifice is the same as that which drives them back into incarnation with fresh impetus in the illusion we think of as later. We also know that it is the same drive which once motivated us as we learned to climb the ladder through the pretty clouds and into the clear light.

And with that knowledge we understand that those still driven by the fears and angers of national pride to supposedly noble suffering and sacrifice will, at some point, either here or in the rest home of spirit, where much previously hidden is finally glimpsed and absorbed, see through the spells which have enchanted them. They will know the potions administered by king, priest and politician for what they are, poisons to be spat out into the faces of those who would insist that their agenda is yours. They will see without doubt, as we do, that all men are equal and brothers in the light, that all sentient beings, whatever their planetary source, share the multiverse as a many leveled playground, where every type of creativity can be conceived and exercised, and that every insult to body or nation is nothing more than a karmic result of actions perpetrated in the mythical long of ago.

Is absolutely everything karmic in origin, I am asked from time to time. I tend to say Yes in response, and go on to refine whatever notions folk have settled for in their quest. For example, there is family and national karma as well as personal. In fact, any sentient energetic unit you participate in will generate karma in the normal course of its unfoldment. And the dismal degradations of war, the lifetime injuries and stress are the price we pay for inflicting suffering on others way back when. Some esoteric traditions maintain that exalted beings sometimes referred to as Lords of Karma administer the appropriate circumstances, and others infer that we, at the soul level, recognizing the need to fill out the balance sheet, enter willingly into bargains that will break us. Take your pick.

Of course, neither the suffering personality nor its grieving colleagues are likely to recall the plan in anything but the vaguest of its outlines, if at all, which, of course, leads to many lives of obedience to, and resentment of, authority and its sumptuously dressed figureheads. One can, and does, emerge from such tunnel vision, like a blinking, bewildered underground animal, unused to the light of freedom from externally imposed agendas. Then there’s likely a couple of lives of floundering about, trying to get comfortable with that freedom. Being your own person and going your own way is a steeper learning curve than it looks, and there are many delusions along the way, cults and fake messiahs being but two.

Finally, or what looks like finally for a while, one comes to see that where there once was the mountains and the clouds, now there are indeed the mountains and the clouds. On the way there was ambition and suffering, desire and joy, unwieldy circumstances, dire straits and places to lay blame. Shit happened and it’s their fault. But somehow, almost drained of that heroic, last stand energy, you swim to the edge of the bloody lake, drag yourself onto the warm sand and look up to see, aha, … the mountains and the clouds.

The narrow door of remembrance has been passed through and the baubles of faith and honour have been left for the trading natives, god bless ’em.